Should I open source my project?
I'm thinking of starting a new approach for acquiring users and getting visibility for my A/B testing service: Open sourcing everything.
The biggest problem I'm facing is the acquisition of the early users and validating the a product. Hands down it's the area where I'm most outside my comfort zone as a developer.
I could change the problem of early user acquisition to something I know how to do decently well: Creating an open source tool and getting exposure and users for it. This is something I've done a couple of times in the past, but the previous projects were not monetisable.
Now I'm thinking about doing an A/B testing tool for developers that uses a similar business model that ghost.org has on their product: Build the whole tool in public with "do anything you want" license and offer paid turnkey hosted version; to make a viable business out of hosting the open-source tool. The open-source version would be a good hook/marketing channel for me.
What do you think? Should I trust my strengths or push through outside my comfort zone?
The question you need to ask yourself is why you want to develop products for others to use.
If your primary focus is for your own interest or skills development then you can just carry on as you are doing now.
However, I think there is an unspoken longing to sell and perhaps even to make a decent living from what you build. If I am right then you already know the answer - you just don't want to hear it.
Once you have had that raging discussion with yourself and know where your true interests lie, the answer will become self-evident.
I think you want to make a living at this game and I think, therefore, that you will need to dip a toe into the market and find out what is involved in selling. It doesn't even have to be with this product: it could be with something else you have already built.
There are two parts to being an indie hacker. The first is the bit most of us enjoy: building stuff.
The second is business. You cannot truly be an indie hacker without either a business head of your own or access to one.
Your proposed solution is - at bottom - ignoring the elephant in the room and I think that, secretly, you know it.
Squirm and feel uncomfortable, learn the ropes and then you will be more comfortable and you might even have a business at the end of it all!
Thanks for your comment!
Yep, making a living. Definitely making a living, sorry the post was not that clear about it :D I corrected it a bit.
Yep, I'm trying to avoid the big elephant in the room that's cold calling/cold emails (cold selling?). I've tried paid acquisition channels (Facebook and Google ads), and they turned out to be costly for doing initial validation (at indie hacker budget).
It seems to me like every book and success story starts with grinding the first sales with directly harassing so many people that you finally get sales. I've done my share of cold calling back when I had a couple short telemarketer jobs, and that's not my strong suit.
I'd use the open source approach as a marketing channel that I know pretty well. I think I should be able to get a decent amount of content marketing traffic to my site from different developer communities; it's just much easier to approach those communities when I have something to give first.
Yep, perhaps I just need to start small by spending 15 minutes a day doing direct, cold contacting. Perhaps it's something that I just need to get my hands dirty with to get forward. Thanks for saying it aloud :)
As you seem to have experience in open source projects, I'd really consider open sourcing. Your problem seems to get noticed and get trust by your potential users.
If I were to look for A/B testing software, I'd wonder: should I trust a market leader, or an unknown newcomer. However if the unknown newcomer is open source, that's an advantage.
My impression is that for potential users of A/B testing the implementation in their business (and not the software) is the biggest problem. So consulting might be an opportunity, see e.g. https://draft.nu/
Jenha — don’t quit before harvest time. 👩🏻🌾
Next week, I’m going to reach out to a few people who do a/b testing for a living.
I’ll share in this thread how I reach out to them on Monday.
Thanks! Looking forward to it :)
Perhaps it's time to give it another shot!
Just recorded the video walkthrough for the outreach guide.
https://www.useloom.com/share/92d913e1bd0143debf929eb7d4f29880
Covered in the video/guide:
How I do outreach:
Find where your potential users already hang out
Create baseline messaging
Customize the outreach email
Manually send it out
Framework and examples covered:
Initial announcement/Feedback email to your friends
FB Groups/Forum feedback outreach
2nd degree connections outreach
Cold outreach initial email
Outreach LinkedIn Connection request
Cold Outreach email to a Peer/Influencer
Cold Outreach to potential (agency) customer
Have your friends share with their network about your product
Here's the Outreach guide
Thank you so much Vanessa, I love it! This helps a ton, really next level stuff for someone just starting up.
Glad you brought up GDPR. Actually when someone brings up GDPR, I direct the conversation to ethics. Is it ethical to send cold emails? Would I want to receive a cold email myself? Are there ways to make an email something you actually would like to receive?
This probably directs the focus to content marketing and other non-intrusive ways of communication.
Good tip that you mentioned Facebook groups. I bet those can be great ways to spark up communication and find initial users without direct one-to-one communication like email.
Great point about ethics. I like the concept that you only want to take actions that are aligned to your personal values and principles.
Wow, the video is just awesome. Even though I'm not in the same space I learned so much from it. Thank you Vanessa :)
I'm trying to do this with Jirassic https://github.com/ralcr/Jirassic but don't think has much effect. My idea was that people could see the code and even try it, but that they'll not bother to keep it up to date and would be easier to just install it from appstore. In the appstore i'll have soon an IAP so don't know what will happen.
In my experience open sourcing can help the best if your tool is something that other people can build on top of.
In the desktop app world there's not that much you can gain from this if you release a full app. You should try maybe to open-source some UI components individually?
Another aspect is security by transparency: you would expect secure communication apps like Telegram to be open source so anyone can verify their integrity and look for bugs.
Cofunder of Countly (https://count.ly) here. We have open sourced (part of) our enterprise product analytics platform since day one so I wanted to give my thoughts on this.
What is the main motivation and reason behind open sourcing your platform? If it is around "more privacy and security" since your potential customers won't share their data with you, then that is a potentially good reason to make money out of it.
In this case, be prepared to serve enterprise customers and make sure your website gives a clear message and vision/mission statement if you want to go that way. This will set you apart from others and focus on a good niche you can make money from.
Make sure you choose your license wisely (think of commercial hard forks, if that bothers you). (hint: Mambo/Joomla, MySQL/MariaDB).
If it is only "visibility", or anything around the lines of ("I will open source and they will come") I bet there are several vendors that will outperform you because of their shitloads of money after their business, and building an A/B testing platform is a complex task which may not be attracting a good amount of developers out there.
In short, if I were you, I wouldn't do it if I don't have an intent to focus on enterprise and/or privacy-focusing customers. Then, it could be an easy bet to reach at least 3 or 4 digit monthly revenues from enterprises, per customer.
I'm in the same boat as you. After 3 projects that gained absolutely no transaction, I decided to open source Brisa Boards.
I would love to monetize it, but it's difficult because I haven't gotten to a point where users are curious enough to try my apps, and then provide feedback.
Open sourcing it will probably make that a bit easier, but isn't short-circuiting the fact that some form of marketing needs to happen still.
You have to spend 90% of your time and effort in finding the problem that is painful enough to pay for the product. As a developer, even I find it difficult not to write single line of code before I have validated the market. I also hate making cold calls and sending cold emails.
Best thing to do is start consulting in an area where you already have interest. You can enjoy the coding work and get paid to solve the problem. Eventually, you can convert the solution into a paid product. With this approach, you know that the market is willing to pay to solve the problem. You will evaluate existing solutions in the market (paid and open source) and probably find a gap in the market or provide more value at a lower cost. Make sure that you don't have any legal hurdles in transitioning from consulting to a product company. You need to make sure there will be no intellectual property issues down the road.